The HubSpot Blog’s Sales Strategy & Trends Report says that 42% of salespeople exceeded their goals in 2021, a similar amount simply met their goals, and 16% underperformed.

In 2022, 41% of salespeople exceeded their goals, and an equal amount met them. 18% said they performed worse than their goals.

Let’s go over how those top-performing sales reps met their goals.

Effective Vs. Ineffective Sales — Why Teams Excelled

Sales teams that met and exceeded their goals reported various strategies and factors contributing to their success.

1. Sales and Marketing Alignment

Salespeople that have outperformed their goals in 2022 are more likely to work at companies with aligned sales and marketing teams. And the most significant benefits of sales and marketing alignment are that it increases revenue and improves the customer experience.

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2. Leveraging a CRM.

Effective salespeople describe their CRM as a very important part of their sales process. This makes sense as a CRM helps you center your sales process around your customers, making it easier to understand their pain points, make value propositions, and meet their needs.

The benefits of using a CRM are that it helps you align teams, consolidate and sync data in one place, and automate tasks to save time so reps can focus on what matters most — having conversations with leads.

3. Sales Enablement

Salespeople at businesses with dedicated sales enablement teams reported better performance against goals than those at companies that don’t.

This means that an effective sales strategy to consider is creating a sales enablement team or championing sales enablement tools. Our report also showed that the most effective types of sales enablement content to win deals are product demos, customer testimonials, and market research.

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4. Sales Management Tools

39% of high-performing sales reps say they use sales management tools, meaning that sales managers likely spend time ensuring reps are trained, coached, and feel supported throughout all steps of the sales process.

5. Social Selling

Top-performing sales reps say that social networking platforms are important to their success. When social selling, the top two trends are using direct messages to answer questions and engage prospects and approaching social media as a search engine to find leads.

In addition, salespeople say that the leads they get from social media are the second highest quality leads.

How do ineffective sales teams compare?

Sales teams that reported falling short of their goals in 2022 were:

• 35% less likely to say sales/marketing have become more aligned at their companies.
• 17% less likely to say that a CRM is very important to their sales process.
• 12% less likely to say that their company has a dedicated sales enablement team.
• 12% less likely to say that they use social media when selling.
• 10% less likely to say that they use sales management tools.

To learn more about sales trends in 2022 and what sales teams are doing, check out the Sales Strategy & Trends Report.